About Anne

ANNE CATTANEO is the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Tony Award Honor nominated Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab.  A three term past president of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, she is the recipient of LMDA’s first Lessing Award for lifetime achievement of dramaturgy. She has worked widely as a dramaturg on classical plays with directors such as Bartlett Sher, Robert Wilson, Adrian Hall, Jack O’Brien, Robert Falls, Mark Lamos and JoAnne Akalaitis.  As the director of the Playworks Program at the Phoenix Theater during the late 1970’s, she commissioned and developed plays by Wendy Wasserstein (ISN’T IT ROMANTIC) Mustapha Matura (MEETINGS) and Christopher Durang (BEYOND THERAPY). For the Acting Company, she created two projects: ORCHARDS (published by Knopf and Broadway Play Publishing) which presented seven Chekhov stories adapted for the stage by Maria Irene Fornes, Spalding Gray, John Guare, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Michael Weller and Samm-Art Williams, and LOVE’S FIRE (published by William Morrow) responses to Shakespeare sonnets by Eric Bogosian, William Finn, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange and Wendy Wasserstein. Her own translations of 20th Century German playwrights include Brecht’s GALILEO (Goodman Theater 1986 starring Brian Dennehy) and Botho Strauss’ BIG AND LITTLE (Phoenix production starring Barbara Barrie, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) She is currently on the theater history faculty at Juilliard. In July 2011, she was awarded the Margo Jones Medal given annually to a “citizen of the theater who has demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, with a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the living theatre everywhere.”  Her book “The Art of Dramaturgy” was published in September. 2021 by Yale University Press. Anne is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

Photo of Anne
by Brigitte Lacombe

Teaching:
Theater History/Dramaturgy Faculty
The Juilliard School, Drama Division
1992-present

Juilliard School Medal- Excellence in Teaching 2017

Visiting Professor
Graduate Theater Program
University of California, San Diego
1984 & 1992
Seminars taught: Jacobean Drama
Dramaturgy Seminar- How to Edit New Plays
Fo, Kreutz and Orton: Three Modern Masters

Graduate Theater Department
Columbia University
Dramaturgy Seminar
1984

Woyzeck Interpreted in Production
Graduate Dramatic Writing Program
New York University
1986
Contemporary American Playwriting

Undergraduate Drama Program
New York University TSOA
1984-88
Various Theater Literature Classes

Head of the Dramaturgy Program
Playwrights Horizons Studio at TSOA
New York University
1983-6

Director, BA Theater Program
Briarcliff College
1974-7

Awards

Phillip van Lear,  Anne, Brian Dennehy, and a young Jeremy Sisto at the rehearsal table of “Galileo,” Goodman Theater, 1986